2 reasons you can't lose weight (that are not diet & exercise)
/You’ve tried everything.
You exercise on a regular basis.
You cut down on all junk food and alcohol.
You eat your veggies.
You even started to take your multivitamin on a regular basis.
But it’s not working: you’re not losing weight.
It becomes very frustrating. You try to exercise more, eat less, but nothing happens!
Aaaaaaaah! Now it’s REALLY frustrating!
Here are 2 reasons why you may not be losing fat despite all your efforts:
Reason 1: STRESS!
Here is how stress can physically stop you from losing fat, and even make you store more fat.
Your body cannot differentiate between physical and emotional stress
No matter the kind of stress, your body’s hormonal reaction will be the same: your adrenal glands release a hormone called Cortisol
Cortisol acts as a “messenger”: it goes all over the body giving instructions. In fact, almost every single organ and cell in your body has Cortisol receptors!
For example, Cortisol goes to your liver and says: “this body is under extreme stress! We need energy quick!”
The liver responds by dumping a lot of sugar into the blood and shuts down fat burning (because we need to save energy!)
Except that, wait a second, there is no emergency! And now all the sugar is in the blood doing nothing!
Your Pancreas now goes crazy! Who put all that sugar there! So it releases a TON of Insulin to remove that excess sugar!
Insulin is another messenger! It goes to the liver and says: “get that sugar out of the blood now!”
So now the liver activates its “fat storing” mechanism: converting a lot of that sugar into triglycerides (fat), which gets deposited in the liver itself (causing fatty liver) and in your adipose tissues (fat cells all around your body)
Because of high level of Insulin, your blood sugar level now drops TOO LOW! This causes you to get CRAVINGS! So you eat more sugar, which again causes your Pancreas to go bananas and tell the liver to get it out (store is as fat)
And so the cycle continues!
In addition, Cortisol reduces the activity of systems in your body which are not needed in an emergency: immune system, digestive system, reproductive system.
SO!! If you want to lose fat, one of the most critical things you need to do is REDUCE STRESS!
Reason 2: SLEEP!
Dozens of studies have shown that insufficient sleep (as well as low quality sleep) severely impact your ability to lose fat.
When you don’t sleep enough:
Your Cortisol level gets raised (the effect of which you saw in Reason 1 above)
Your muscular Insulin sensitivity drops significantly: this means that every time you eat and Insulin is produced (which is normal), your muscles “don’t listen” to that Insulin. They ignore it. So instead of all that glucose in your blood going to the muscles to get stored (or used), it goes to your liver to get converted into fat!
Your production of Leptin (hormone which tells your brain you’re NO LONGER hungry) drops, and the production of Ghrelin (hormone which tells your brain you’re HUNGRY) increases! This causes you to have cravings all the time and be continuously hungry (and eat much more than what your body requires)
So: make sure you get 7-8 hours of HIGH QUALITY sleep if you want to lose weight!
